Thursday, December 19, 2013

On the last day
of class this semester, I wanted to give my students the gifts of wonder, awe,
and inspiration. I wanted them to marvel at things that could be done. For many
years now I have taught and reread Roland Barthes Camera Lucida and not once during these years (a decade now?) have
I stopped to ask my students why Philip Glass and Robert Wilson were
photographed by Mapplethorpe. (For Barthes, the young Bobby Wilson is all punctum.) On the last day of class,
I projected this onto the screen:

I asked if they
recognized the photograph. Yes, they had seen it in Barthes’ book. But not one
of them could tell me why the two are photographed together. Then, I tell them
that in 1976, the two of them, Glass and Wilson, collaborated on a piece of
musical theatre called Einstein on the
Beach. I myself had not heard of Einstein
on the Beach until I was a graduate student and would listen to it in my
husband’s—who was not yet then my husband—dorm-style campus apartment, a setting
perhaps that is in total opposition to the dreamy and enchanting music-scape
that is Einstein on the Beach. And
although I had been, previously that semester, introduced to Schoenberg’s
twelve-tone method, it had not prepared me for the utter snowflakes, the
ephemeral sea, the lulling wave crashing that is Einstein on the Beach.

I could watch
over and over again this documentary, which I showed my students.

And to think,
public television used to broadcast such beautiful things, I tell them, a
statement that makes me realize that I have grown older. And I am ever so much
older than I was in 1976 when Einstein on
the Beach debuted (and when I was born) or in 1984 when Glass and Wilson put
the show on again for the New Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or
in 2002 when I heard for the first time, on a CD player, the one two three four
fives.

Einstein on the
Beach is the electronic pulsing of the essay that has been turned inside out,
that has been ripped at the seams. It is the pure and perfect postmodernist
dream, riffing from classical dance and opera yet subverting those very
traditions at the same time they celebrate them. There is repetition, change
through repetition, collaging, splicing of the overheard, fragments of
conversation/advertisements/instructions/trifles, historical inquiry and
plundering, the inclusion of the seemingly insignificant and the horrifically
mundane, a meditative surmounting of the opera’s heroic subject.

And what
essayists have done things such as these? One doesn’t have to look too far to
see these elements at work in classical essays. (Please leave your answers in
the comments field.)

The background of
Einstein on the Beach is composed electronic
hums, blips, and beeps; one senses that at its very core is a strange mechanism,
an enormous supercomputer with no connection to the empirical world yet
nevertheless striving to connect to that world. But I had grown
up in the 80s. The very soundtrack of my life was electronic. The world pulsed
through the sound of machinery. The term postmodernism
and what it represented was occluded from me; I could not see the forest
for the trees. I could fast-forward and rewind, fast-forward and rewind and
hear again and again a phrase or song. I could record my very voice and play it
back and speed it up and slow it down again.

And I have been
thinking about this impulse in my writing and in the writing of postmodern
essays in general; that is, there exists an impulse to false-begin, to say
exact words over again, to abruptly insert a pronouncement, to skip over
pertinent parts, to return to a scene over and over again.

I am officially
old-fashioned now, now that I can see the forest for the trees.

I do not know
how to end this except to say: that when, in video games, which were the playthings
of the 80s, when new life was given, it was given with an electronic beeping;
and when the struggle or flight or fight commenced, there was electronic
beeping; and when a death occurred, there was an electronic beeping. And I have
been hearing these sounds less and less.

1 comment:

I have never seen "Einstein on the Beach" before (even if I'm more than old enough) - thank you so much for bringing my attention to it, it's an absolute fantastic piece!

I am sure I'm not the most competent reader of your text,but hasn't the essay always been about "repetition, change through repetition, collaging, splicing of the overheard, fragments of conversation/advertisements/instructions/trifles, historical inquiry and plundering, the inclusion of the seemingly insignificant and the horrifically mundane, a meditative surmounting of the opera’s heroic subject"? No matter what we decide to name the period of history we are working within?

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